WW I

The number of writers who served in the Great War is enormous: some of them fought on the front lines, very many among them were killed. A few years after the war, the "French Association of soldier–writers" published a five–volume Anthology of Writers Killed in the War, listing 525 names. Again, considerable is the number of those whom the very war experience turned into writers, making them compose diaries, memoirs, or letters to their loved ones. This enormous wave in writing will actually come to an end with the outbreak of the Second World War, as its horrors generated an immensely more voluminous literature which is still being written today.